Heteronuclear refocusing by nonlinear phase and amplitude modulation on a single transmitter channel.

The application of low magnetic fields to heteronuclear NMR has expanded recently alongside the emergence of methods for achieving near unity polarization of spin ensembles, independent of magnetic field strength. The parahydrogen induced hyperpolarization methods in particular, often use a hybrid arrangement where a high field spectrometer is used to detect or image polarized molecules that have been conjured on a separate, dedicated polarizer instrument operating at fields in the mT regime where yields are higher. For controlling polarizer chemistry, spare TTL channels of portable NMR spectrometers can be used to pulse program reaction timings in synchrony with heteronuclear RF transformations. The use of a spectrometer as a portable polarizer control module has the advantage of allowing detection in situ, simplifying the process of optimizing polarization yields prior to in vivo experimental trials. Suitable heteronuclear spectrometers compatible with this application are becoming more common, but are still sparsely available in comparison to a large existing infrastructure of single channel NMR consoles. With the goal of expanding the range of these systems to multinuclear applications, the feasibility of rotating a pair of heteronuclear spins ((13)C and (1)H) at 12mT was investigated in this study. Nonlinear phase and amplitude modulated waveforms designed to simultaneously refocus magnetization at 128kHz ((13)C) and 510kHz ((1)H) were generated numerically with optimal control. Although precise quantitative comparisons were not attempted due to limitations of the experimental setup, signals refocused at heteronuclear frequencies with this PANORAMIC approach (Precession And Nutation for Observing Rotation At Multiple Intervals about the Carrier) yielded amplitudes comparable to signals which were refocused using traditional block pulses on heteronuclear channels. Using this PANORAMIC approach to heteronuclear NMR at low field would reduce expense as well as hardware complexity and bulk, weighed against the caveat that elaborate pulses are required. More work will be necessary to test this method on the targeted application of parahydrogen induced hyperpolarization as well as to quantify efficiency, but upon further development we anticipate that this method may offer a viable 'software' approach to heteronuclear manipulations of spins at low magnetic fields.